Dramatic Action in Greek Tragedy and Noh: Reading with and beyond Aristotle - Paperback

by Mae J. Smethurst (Author)

By looking at 15^th/16^th realistic noh and Greek tragedies through the lens of Aristotle and of each other, this comparison reveals a previously unnoticed relationship between the structure of the tragedies and their performance, that is, the involvement of the third actor at the climactic moments of the plot in both and the actor stepping out of character in noh. This observation helps to account for Aristotle's view that tragedy be limited to three actors.

Author Biography

Mae Smethurst is professor of classics and East Asian literature at the University of Pittsburgh. She has authored two books: The Artistry of Aeschylus and Zeami: A Comparative Study of Greek Tragedy and Noh (Princeton University Press 1989) and Dramatic Representations of Filial Piety (Cornell East Asia 1998). The first book won the Hitomi Arisawa Prize for an outstanding book published by an American university press in 1989-1990, and the second won the United States-Japan Friendship Commission's prize through the Donald Keene Center at Columbia for an outstanding translation from pre-modern Japanese to English in 2002. She also edited with the help of co-editor Christina Laffin a volume on noh: Ominameshi: A Flower Viewed from Many Directions.